Self-orchestration and choreography: towards architecture-agnostic manufacturing systems

One of the significant challenges for current and future manufacturing systems is that of providing rapid reconfigurability in order to evolve and adapt to mass customization. This challenge is aggravated if new types of processes and components are introduced, as existing components are expected to interact with the novel entities but have no previous knowledge on how to collaborate. This paper reviews the concepts of orchestration and choreography applied to device-level Web services, and proposes the use of semantic Web Services in order to overcome the aforementioned challenge. The capabilities of semantic Web services for performing automatic service discovery, selection, composition and invocation enable manufacturing systems to self-orchestrate without need for manual configuration, and without need for concentrating logic in centralized systems.